Reflection Of Project Management

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Introduction
Project management is a discipline based on careful planning, organization, motivation and control of resources to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria. Since every project is unique in nature, a project manager must learn to adapt and identify key areas to drive success. Thus, as a learning initiative, we were given a project to manage through a simulation program named Sim4Project. The emphasis of this simulation was on learning-by-doing, just like in a real-life project. Sim4Project provided a good mix of theoretical knowledge as well as hands-on experience. Professor Leonie gave feedbacks at the end of each period to ensure we were incorporating the project management principles learned in the classroom. …show more content…

Throwing parties and having constructive meeting between individual members of the team are very useful and needed to keep the team on track and their spirit high. However, this didn’t work well in my case. Sending my team members to training really helped fill out some of the gaps in their skills and cut on hiring cost. For example, I’ve sent my Design Engineer to learn some negotiation techniques and quality principles which really helped on periods 7 and 8. Additionally, by making my Business Analyst refresh his market researching and negotiation skills I was able to send him on couple procurement …show more content…

The WBS is a key decider of a project completion and success. As we’ve learned in class the WBS defines the project’s scope and any changes in the WBS will affect the scope of the project and vis-versa. If we weren’t provided with the detailed WBS of the project at the start, I wouldn’t know exactly how to allocate resources for each period. To think that a PM is responsible to develop a workable project WBS , using techniques like Top-Down and Bottom-Up, is very mind bottling and impressive. I’ve also learned of the importance of budget allocation. As stated earlier, I had a little bit of budgeting issues throughout the simulation. Even though I was over budget, like everybody in the class, I wasn’t too far off.
Finally, I’ve learned the importance of looking ahead on the schedule to make decisions. The point of looking at upcoming activities is a good practice for a PM to make sure he/she will be ready when times come. By analyzing two to three periods ahead, I was able to anticipate and keep track of my resources and spending especially in periods where parallel tasks were executed. It wasn’t a perfect 10/10 hindsight but still useful.

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